"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Another Brick In The Wall

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British rock stars were never part of Hillary's crumbling firewall-- not like Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, the #2 Democrat in the Georgia Senate, who flipped his endorsement this morning from Hillary to Bernie-- but, nonetheless, another brick in the wall is now out of reach for her campaign which is being viewed world over as less and less believeable and less and less inevitable. Pink Floyd's Roger Waters was early in seeing the danger of the neocon monster that is so much a part of Hillary Clinton. Back in October he endorsed Bernie and said he was worried that Hillary "might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody."The other day I was interviewed by someone writing a book about the early days of psychedelic rock and she knew more about me than I could remember myself. "Do you remember," she asked almost reverentially, "when you played See Emily Play on WUSB for the first time, the first airplay Pink Floyd ever got in America?" Oy. I don't remember much about my Stony Brook dj days. I was always up on the roof of the station getting high between long tracks like Revelation from Da Capo. But I do remember that I played Arnold Layne before I played "See Emily Play." So someone was misremembering something here. I liked "See Emily Play" way better and played it more often.Waters can't vote in a U.S. election but he told Rolling Stone why he's hoping Bernie wins. "He's the only person in the race that I see with any credibility. He seems to speak the truth, far as one can tell at this point. He seems prepared to stand up against big money and the banks and stand up for the predicaments of minorities, the middle class and the working class in this country."

He says that Hillary Clinton is a "far better alternative than any of the Republican candidates by a long, long way," but he still has severe reservations about her. "Hillary worries me," he says. "I have an awful worry that she might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody. There is something scarily hawkish about her, and she has that politician look down of, 'You are never going to get a word of truth out of me.'"Many Democrats say that if Sanders is nominated, it will hand the election to the Republicans because the Vermont senator is so radical. "It is true that people become marginalized if their politics appear too far to the left," he says. "That is why I admire Sanders. When he speaks the truth, he sounds very left-wing, but that is because we have been fed this right-wing bullshit by the whole of the mainstream media since the Second World War. And it has gotten worse and worse and worse, and the outlets for dissenting voices have become fewer and fewer. So he is bound to sound out of step, because he is! And that is what is so good about him."

Back to Georgia for a moment, where Senator Fort explained his switch to Bernie by saying, "After months of looking at Bernie’s record and studying his positions on healthcare, Wall Street, predatory lending and the minimum wage, I came to the conclusion that Bernie’s position on the issues that affect my constituents in Georgia the most conform most closely to my positions... He’s going to do well here. As people have a chance to listen to him, to have a chance to understand that he’s speaking to the issues that are the most critica. As people study and listen to him, I think there’s going to be movement toward his campaign." Fort is now the most high-profile Bernie backer in Georgia, joining state Rep. LaDawn Jones and Clarkston Mayor Ted Terry-- and putting him at odds with a very uninspiring party establishment.

Hillary and her surrogates have, predictably, floated the ugly Clintonian smear that Bernie is lying when he says he was involved in the Civil Rights movement. It's well-documented-- and though she doesn't bring it up when talking on the campaign trail, she admits it when cornered-- that she was a Goldwater Girl and subsequently the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley College at the time. Bernie was at the University of Chicago, president of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Perhaps she's changed; she seems to on about everything-- but he hasn't. He's been a stalwart fighter for progressive values while she was a right-wing activist and a corporate shill, sitting on the Board of Walmart. Here's a video of him being arrested in 1963 at a school segregation protest in Englewood: